The Higgs boson isn't the God particle, but it's about as fundamental as anything can get, and discovering it required the biggest experiment in the history of science. It makes an intriguing documentary.

Two scientists - David Kaplan, professor of particle physics at Johns Hopkins, and Mark Levinson, a filmmaker with a doctorate in physics from UC Berkeley - have produced "Particle Fever," a drama of the experiment's real people in failure and triumph, and an intimate look at the awesome world of Big Science.

It's 99 minutes long, but worth it, and have no fear of heavy stuff: There is none.

Back in the 1960s, a British physicist named Peter Higgs proposed a theory that would explain how everything in the universe - including people - could exist.

Conferring mass

There must be a fundamental subnuclear particle, he argued, that confers mass on everything else, for without mass there would be neither people nor planets nor the universe itself. We might all be merely light beams. Or nothing.

The mystery particle is known as the Higgs boson, and physicists have built the biggest machine of all trying to find it. It's called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, located at CERN, the European nuclear research center in Switzerland.

The LHC is the biggest and, at more than $10 billion, the most expensive research machine ever built. It is hidden underground, where its proton beams race around a 17-mile track at nearly the speed of light, controlled by hundreds of powerful superconducting magnets. The immense building is seven stories high.

In the film, fragments of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony soar in the background while the screen fills with images of Galileo and van Gogh's "Starry Night."

And in the opening, the camera sees the machinery as gigantic and awesome works of art, moving above vanishingly small trolls - its helmeted work crews.

And then there are the scientists, calculating, musing, playing pingpong, and playing their computers like musical instruments.

Grace and toughness

Fabiola Gianotti, a classical pianist before she earned her degree in particle physics, leads the LHC's team of 3,000 physicists and engineers with grace and toughness, and explains her team's goals with such passion that she couldn't be better portrayed by Hollywood.

"If we screw up in front of them," she warns her colleagues in a moment of crisis, then the watching media and the world would scoff.

There's Savas Dimopoulos, an eminent physics professor from Stanford who muses on camera how the LHC should offer "a sense of pride for humanity" because the big atom smasher has the power of the human mind to probe the universe.

To Dimopoulos, "Science and art are the very things that make us human."

There is Monica Dunford, a young postdoc who runs marathons, climbs mountains and works at the LHC 16 hours a day. Her career is on the line in the unprecedented experiment, and at one point when the proton beams are running smoothly, her eyes are on her computer and she is transfixed: "Data! Data! It's unbelievable how fantastic data is!"

These scientists are all keyed up. David Kaplan, the film's long-haired producer and frequent narrator, plays a smashing game of pingpong against long-haired Iran-born Nima Arkani-Hamed, and while the rackets flail, the two debate supersymmetry versus multiverse - key issues for the Higgs.

The filmmakers were lucky when the experiment's crucial proton beams were about to be switched on in 2008. Tension in the control room was palpable. The countdown went to zero. And then, disaster: 50 superconducting magnets failed; 6 tons of liquid helium exploded. It would take a year to recover. The camera caught it all.

Filming luck

And in 2009 came filming luck again: The experiment's colliding particle beams raced around their underground tracks successfully for the first time, and scientists were elated.

Finally, in the climax, an auditorium filled with elated physicists and their students hears Atlas team leader Gianotti announce the historic discovery of what would be confirmed as the long-sought Higgs boson.

A small, somewhat pudgy man walks down to a seat in front. He stands to a huge ovation. His eyes are moist. He whips out a handkerchief and seems to smile. He is Peter Higgs, and the cameras for "Particle Fever" catch all that, too.